General

On any given day, the plank you’re forced to walk seems to always come up a couple of steps short.
“Manager to the valet stand.” Those seemingly innocuous five words combined in that precise order are usually enough to make any relatively sane supervisor duck for cover. That’s because the person at the end of that sentence is usually impatiently waiting to spew random entitlement like IED shrapnel that connects with whichever random unlucky warrior who just happens to be in the way at the time.

Not everyone born on an Indian reservation who was sent to reform school and Vietnam ends up a renown, international writer, but Jim Northrup did.
It’s been nearly four years since Northrup passed away. He’s remembered for his syndicated newspaper column “Fond du Lac Follies,” books, humorous stories, cathartic war-poetry, and cruising the backroads in a 64 corvette his wife won at a casino.

Words are inadequate to describe certain experiences that happen outside the law of cause and effect.  Although they are universal, they are often so weird that to recount them makes most people uncomfortable, unless they are New Agers, spiritualists, or mind-curers who believe in the great American tradition of the happiness machine, revelations on every bathroom wall, Jesus’s face in cloud formations, or apparitions in every shadow. I am none of those.

Question: Should people from the oppressor group tell the oppressed people how to conduct their resistance?
Should Jews tell Palestinians what form their resistance to Israeli oppression should take? During World War II should Germans have directed Jewish, Roma, Slavic resistance in the concentration camps?
Nowadays, should whites be telling Blacks how to resist systemic racism — a racism entrenched by segments (and maintained by a plurality) of White society?

Imagine this: A so-called presidential historian for a major television network publishes an interview in the most famous newspaper in the world with the most famous singer/songwriter in the world, who has recently written an explosive song accusing the U.S.

Travesty or Tragedy?
I have often wondered what the world would have been like if the USA had lost 20% of its population (like the Soviet Union in WWII or Salvador and Guatemala at US hands) in any one of its endless wars?

The irony of this quote from the Dustin Hoffman movie, The Graduate, is not wasted on Duane Snider:

— One word: plastics.

That was Benjamin Braddock, just graduated from college, sitting in a swimming pool. Giving him advice on gaining the American dream, the neighbor’s statement says it all. Today? Hedge funds? Flipping houses? Coronavirus repossessions?
For Duane, that one word: artwork.

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War1 is one of the most influential books written on military strategy and philosophy. This is not confined to just Asians but Europeans and Americans alike have attempted to study The Art of War hoping its wisdom would be revealed to them.

The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases.

Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak? No. Sabrina Williams’ 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most by any man or woman in the Open Era? No. Michael Phelps’ all-time record for Olympic gold medals? No.
Those records and all like them matter only to a few and will probably be broken someday.